The Three Kinds of Absence of Own-Nature

T1606 draws out four distinct reasons behind this single statement, none of which amounts to the wholesale non-existence the twenty-eight wrong views mistakenly read into it. Lacking a spontaneous nature means simply that nothing arises entirely on its own, independent of conditions — "no own-nature" here rules out uncaused, spontaneous arising, not existence as such. Lacking a persisting substance means that whatever substance a dharma once had, that very substance cannot recur again once it has passed — nothing is available to be "reused." Lacking an abiding substance means that even a dharma presently existing, though not yet at the moment of its own destruction, is already necessarily on its way to ceasing — it has, in this sense, no fixed substance genuinely at rest. And lacking the nature the foolish take hold of means that ordinary beings who have not yet seen the truths, carried along by habits of naming and conceptual proliferation, mistakenly grasp at dharmas as possessing some fixed characteristic-nature that in fact they never had — real dharmas are simply free of that specific, mistakenly grasped nature. Each of these four points at a genuine absence, but none of them denies that dharmas exist and function at all — which is exactly the distinction the twenty-eight wrong views collapse.

T1606 works through each of the three natures in turn, and this threefold division is what finally resolves the entire question at stake since Part 78: emptiness never denies all three natures in exactly the same way, and reading it as though it did is precisely the error the twenty-eight wrong views commit. The discriminated nature — the "this is form," "this is nirvāṇa" that the unenlightened project onto experience through conceptual overlay — simply has no characteristic of its own at all to begin with; its absence of own-nature is total, since it was never anything more than a name imposed on what is actually there. The dependent nature — the mere dependently-arisen flow of mistaken discrimination itself, together with the causal relations among such flows — does genuinely arise and function, but never spontaneously or of its own accord; its absence of own-nature lies specifically in this absence of independent, uncaused arising, not in any absence of existence altogether. And the perfected nature — the true suchness of all dharmas, the pure object of contemplation itself — lacks own-nature only in the sense that it is not any separately existing "ultimate substance" standing apart from and set over against the dependent nature; rather, it simply is that same dependent nature once the discriminated nature's own false overlay has finally been removed from it. Three natures, three genuinely different kinds of absence — a discrimination the treatise insists on precisely because collapsing all three into a single blanket "nothing exists" is what produces every one of the twenty-eight wrong views just catalogued.

The treatise's own brevity here is deliberate: each further claim is to be understood by the very same threefold analysis just given for the absence of own-nature, applied in turn to being unborn, unceasing, inherently still, and inherently nirvāṇa. Nothing here adds some further, more extreme negation on top of what has already been established — the discriminated nature simply never arose or ceased to begin with, since it was never anything more than an imposed name; the dependent nature does not arise spontaneously or independent of conditions, and equally does not cease as some substantial thing being destroyed, since its own arising was never independent to begin with; and the perfected nature, being nothing other than the dependent nature once falsely discriminated characteristics have been removed, is inherently still and inherently nirvāṇa in the very same qualified sense that it inherently lacks own-nature — not a separate, additional attainment reached only afterward, but what was quietly already the case, correctly seen at last.